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Call the Whaaambulance!

“What happened to our beautiful party … the one built on the Southern Strategy, whistled to in Philadelphia MS, powered by the hateful racist rhetoric of Lee Atwater, and dedicated to crushing the poor, women, people of color, and the elderly??? We must reclaim it from the racist misogynist so that we can get back to the noble task of granny-killing, poor-starving, and sick-kicking Ryanism!”

Sad Republicans are Sad!

Okay okay … here is a real quote: “He isn’t eschewing political correctness. He is eschewing basic human decency.” Gosh, where would he get the idea that THAT was okay????

Here is a palate cleanser. Samantha Bee on the Democratic National Convention lovefest and “Donald Trump, America’s burst appendix”:

One more thing: Hey, Republicans, could we have the “Party of Lincoln” name since you obviously have no further use for it? It will look nice on a banner next to President Barack Obama’s official portrait in the White House.

3 comments for “Call the Whaaambulance!”

[S]ome commentators are calling on [Hillary Clinton] to make a right turn, moving the Democratic agenda toward the preferences of those fleeing the sinking Republican ship. The idea, I guess, is to offer to create an American version of a European-style grand coalition of the center-left and the center-right.

I don’t think there’s much prospect that Mrs. Clinton will actually do that. […]

The Trumpification of the G.O.P. didn’t come out of nowhere. On the contrary, it was the natural outcome of a cynical strategy: long ago, conservatives decided to harness racial resentment to sell right-wing economic policies to working-class whites, especially in the South.

This strategy brought many electoral victories, but always at the risk that the racial resentment would run out of control, leaving the economic conservatives — whose ideas never had much popular support — stranded. And that is what has just happened.

So now the strategy that rightists had used to sell policies that were neither popular nor successful has blown up in their faces. And the Democratic response should be to adopt some of those policies? Say what?

“Say what?” indeed.

Trumpism is basically a creation of the modern conservative movement, which used coded appeals to prejudice to make political gains, then found itself unable to rein in a candidate who skipped the coding.

If some conservatives find this too much and bolt the party, good for them, and they should be welcomed into the coalition of the sane. But they can’t expect policy concessions in return.

For the past many months Republican leaders have been condemning Trump’s acts while sticking with Trump the man. Trump is making that position ridiculous and shameful. You either stand with a man whose very essence is an insult to basic decency, or you don’t. […]

There comes a time when neutrality and laying low become dishonorable. If you’re not in revolt, you’re in cahoots. When this period and your name are mentioned, decades hence, your grandkids will look away in shame.

For the good of the nation, the Republican Party as it is presently constituted has to die.

Ever since the late 1970s, when it determined to ally itself with a politicized splinter of American evangelical Protestantism, having previously allied itself with the detritus of American apartheid, the Republican Party has been reeling toward catastrophe even as it succeeded at the ballot box, and taking the country along with it. Crackpot economic theories were mainstreamed in the 1980s. Crackpot conspiracy theories and god-drunk fantasies were mainstreamed in the 1990s. Crackpot imperial adventures abroad were mainstreamed in the 2000s. And all of these were mainstreamed at once in opposition to the country’s first African American president over the past eight years.

Modern conservatism has proven to be not a philosophy, but a huge dose of badly manufactured absinthe. It squats in an intellectual hovel now, waiting for its next fix, while a public madman filches its tattered banner and runs around wiping his ass with it. […]

It long has been the duty of the Democratic Party to the nation to beat the crazy out of the Republican Party until it no longer behaves like a lunatic asylum. The opportunity to do this, to act unilaterally in returning sanity to the Republic, never has been as wide and gleaming as it is right now. To argue that responsible government requires that you treat sensibly a party that has gone as mad as the Republicans have is to argue for government by delirium.

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